Lecture

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics and SculptureCenter present Subjective Histories of Sculpture this year with Lucy Skaer, Nairy Baghramian, and Josephine Meckseper. The artists have been invited to cite specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside “art,” to develop their own subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories, question assumptions, and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture’s evolving strategies.

Lucy Skaer is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, photography, installation, printmaking, and film, who displaces the familiar through manipulations in scale and material. Her resulting works embrace multiplicity and abstraction while questioning our day-to-day perception and supposed knowledge of the world. Transformations of existing artifacts and architectural elements create a loss of bearing and question the reliability of memory and history itself. Skaer often incorporates pre-existing imagery or found forms to re-imagine and re-materialize history in objects whose meanings migrate and become transposed as they take on different forms. Her sculpture and works on paper create a type of linguistic system, one that merges subject and object and favors open gestures rather than distinct references.

Born in Cambridge, England, in 1975, Skaer currently lives in New York. She works primarily in sculpture, painting, film, and installation. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and has had solo exhibitions at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; and Chisenhale Gallery, London, among other venues. She has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including the 52nd Venice Biennale; the 5th Berlin Biennale; and recent group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and K21, Dusseldorf. Skaer was a Turner Prize finalist in 2009.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”